Training Max: Chapter 4

 

“Wow,” said Janice, Chris’ best friend, “he actually apologized?”, knowing full well and being audience to Chris’ trauma dump every time she either got ghosted, left behind, or hurt, one after another, by her now-fifteen always unapologetic exes. Chris knew this, and knew this well: even her nephew, Tres, always reminds her of how she had a very poor track record when it came to men. She married the last one, Tim, after all, and he went back to the States after proving once and for all that he cannot quit his alcoholism. After suffering the hell of six years, she quit him, instead, she, of the eternal indifference of most existentialists, had had enough compassion fatigue.

Janice was a strange one: an introvert to her very timid core, she was only mindful of duty, and hence kind of neurotic because of it. She was Chris’ voice of reason, one among a handful of people that can call her an idiot and shut her up. She knew it; Chris knew it. They both know that the other knew it. That was the only reason why their friendship lasted all of thirty-odd years.

Janice was pensive. He actually apologized, this one. An apology, she knew, always harbors and therefore implies a promise: I promise to be here, changed, for you.  Throughout her life, she only had two relationships, the one lasting a mere two months out of a desperate sadness, the other (of twenty-three years,) she married. Her and her husband were not cohabiting, however, for their own reasons, which all of their families combined could not understand.

One of Chris’ exes particularly stood out in her memory: Alex. He had the honor of ghosting, leaving, and hurting her all in one go, right after he proposed marriage to her. She was texted by Chris’ sister, the latter begging her to go to Chris’ condo to offer her support and company and eternal presence and wisdom after Chris’ sister heard that he had dumped her. Chris was surprised and expecting her: and they ended up spending the entire day talking about aubergines. That was the day that Chris decided to go to therapy, after being in denial for twenty-eight years.

Today, however, they were sitting in Café Will, where they will they hang out sometimes, Janice perpetually working on editing audio transcripts. She took her break from a long file, invited Chris to smoke in the parking lot, and continued their conversation.

“Don’t let him go just yet. Though he was right, you know, about you quitting smoking for you, not for anybody else.” Chris had quit for six months, opting to chew nicotine gum instead. After, however,  week full of stressors, she brought back the habit and hadn’t quit since.

“I know.”

“It’s always the same with you: I wonder if your otherwise brilliant mind refuses to learn at all. You recognize patterns but do not break them. Look at yourself, and do things for yourself. Fuck everyone else.” Continue your PhD, she almost said, but, having said this injunction this to her friend a million times, decided to not throw it in her face this time. She knew Chris eternally planned to have her PhD done, one time in Canada, another in Ohio, another in New Zealand, and yet another plan involving Czechia. She sighed. Here we go again.

Max laid in his bunker, looking at Chris’ many pictures, and decided to send one of his own. She sleepily replied with a heart to his picture.

“Hi, baby.”

“Hello,” she replied, and knowing full well that this was stolen time, she added (as a goodbye and as declaration), “I love you,” using his last name, rarely, reserving it for times of orgasm or berating him.

“Love you, too,” he replied, adding, “Ramoya,” in another text following his declaration.

“Yes?” she said, misunderstanding that her last name was indeed a continuation of his address and not a prologue to a question.

“Bye for now.”

She didn’t reply; she slept, knowing that she needed it after a mere ten hours of sleep within the last one-hundred twenty. Her bipolar II wouldn’t let her down from her mania, thus the resulting insomnia. She was also sure that the reason for this was Max. I have poor grasp, if at all, of causality. She didn’t know, after all, whether it was her environment that made her sad; or that it was her sadness that made her look the way she did at her environment. Furthermore, she once read The Noonday Demon and found a metaphor so disgusting and fundamentally wrong to her academic core that she put down the book, never returning to it again. In it were the words, “A person with a personality disorder is like a tree being slowly suffocated by vines.”

She tried. Oh, she tried. She had meds for stabilizing her dysregulation, and went to therapy regularly, where Dr. Flores always kicked her in the shin of her brain. She even wrote in her blog:

Let me put it in more mundane terms. A person is diagnosed with a disorder. They go to a doctor, who prescribes them medicine to chemically normalize symptomology of the disorder. Why?

Because the reasoning to prescription proceeds from all manner of assumptions - involving an ontological magisteria (the neurobiochemical) as well as a causal magisteria (behaviors). The reasoning thus involves both thing and process: the thing is the composition; the process is what the thing does or undergoes.

That, however, is too limiting a metaphysics, for it also harbors another assumption: a thing is not in itself process; there is an exclusive disjunction between the two. Traditional philosophy would, according to Derrida and Levinas at least, be violent in this regard, for it programmatically makes things about being. Things, processes, all being. Psychology would go the same route: behaviors, being, causality in terms of stimulus and response.

Things and verbs, things and processes.

How does one get well from a disorder? What is the relation between a thing, a state, an identity, and a process, a movement, a dynamism?

What is a disorder?

What is man?

What is? What isses? What is issing? What is? When you say a rose is a rose is a rose, where do you start rosing?

This is the precise problem of the ancients, the problem of the one and the many. You cannot step on the same river twice, and all that.

Unless, of course, you hijack the entire reasoning and say that the thing itself is a process, in which case there would be no thing itself. No it, no self, as such. No as such. (Derrida and Heraclitus, you are bastards.)

If you are not your disorder, then what are you, and what is it? Are two essences involved here, two things, co-habiting, intermingling? How? Where then, is causality? Is there one? How do the essences become what they are? Nature and nurture, yes, but in order to even make sense of that argument, you have to start with a thing, and with a process, and also end with a thing, and a process.

How are things processes?

As I said, if you can answer how a thing is a verb, then you have language spanning philosophy and psychology, without, hopefully, resorting to either thing or process. You would have solved the problem of personal identity, metaphysics, and disorders.

See, for people who have conditions the symptomatology of which include being passionless, overanalytic, depressed, manic, suffering from derealization, god complexes, and/or have sledgehammers for brains, i.e., those who absolutely do not put the B in "subtle," detachment is always already a problem. By default we occupy a space that is the world, but we feel not of the world. By the same stroke and mechanism, however, we get fixated on the littlest of things, and have tendencies of imposing control on our surroundings if only to make sense of the chaos that we go through every single day within our brains. Sometimes the only reason why we function is, like in Mr. Burns, all our dysfunctionalities get stuck in the doorway trying to outrun one another.

Finishing the piece with a stolen image of Self-Made Man sculpted by Bobby Carlyle, she added, knowing full well that the question she will pose will fly over most her audience’s heads: “Where did the hammer and chisel come from?”